Kind of / sort of. Most of the dragons went for Power -- own a big company and/or control territory.
Primarily corporate dragons are few:
- Lofwyr (Saeder-Krupp)
- Rhonabwy (Transys Neuronet)
This isn't to say that the rest of them don't have claws in other corporations, just that their focus isn't on building
their corporation. Not the way those two are. Most of them go for physical territory:
- Hestaby (Shasta area)
- Ryumyo (Japan)
- Lung (China)
- Ghostwalker (Denver; yes, I know he came after, but he fits the frame)
- Hualpa (Amazonia)
- Aden (The Middle East)
- Masaru (The Philippines)
- Rhonabwy (Wales)
- Schwartzkopf (Eastern Europe)
- Mujaji (South Africa)
Of course, many of these are clashing with Lofwyr as he spreads his corporate Power into their areas; Aden fights him by proxy fairly regularly as they strive for control over the Middle East.
A very few seem to particularly pursue either raw Power or use the mass of power they have to pursue their own agendas:
- Sirrug is hunting the dragon-hunters without care for collateral damage;
- Alamais is opposing everyone (and especially Lofwyr) just for the sake of sticking his thumb in their eye;
- Kaltenstein is (was?) trying to scrub the world of toxics before he went batsh!t crazy;
- and Arleesh is ... Arleesh. If you don't already know what she's doing, welcome to the truly bizarre end of the universe.
In all these, Power is the goal, or Power is the weapon; Power, first and foremost and above all, is what's going on.
Not so with Dunkelzahn.
The Big D may have acquired Power, but never openly; what he sought was
Influence. Influence over people's hearts and minds and perceptions, the way people thought (about him, about dragons, about magic, about metahumanity, just generally about the Sixth World), the direction of their research, everything. He wanted to learn about people, why they thought the way they thought; he took a wild-hair-up-his-tail plunge in 2033 by funding a brain-trust of stock manipulators and computer programmers and helped them plan, program, and pull off a computer-driven genius stock scramble that functionally did in 63 seconds what took patient, thorough, and utterly draconic Lofwyr 20 years to do -- take over a AAA-rated megacorporation.
20 years, boiled down to 63 seconds. That's a reduction of over
ten million times. Dunkelzahn saw how humanity moved; he
learned. He studied, he realized, he understood, and most important of all, he
adapted. This is unusual for humans; in dragons, it's bloody near unheard of.
Did he get Power from it? Sure he did, but Power was neither his goal nor his tool. Influence was his leverage, his
raison d'etre, and learning and adapting was how he went about it -- something that the other Great Dragons, and even the Immortal Elves, simply have lost the knack of doing, either easily or well. No, Dunkelzahn was a
most abnormal dragon indeed ...
